“Christ,” you said flatly. “That looks unmissable.” You pointed to the schedule. The evening’s social event was labeled “Social Event.”
Still we mooched to the pub indicated, which turned out, unbelievably enough, to be hosting a nostalgic night of Oi! music, not only much too loud but not nearly reconstructed enough for the comfort of a bunch of Reds who had not heard that genre of thumpy chanting, if at all, since it was bellowed by NF boot boys.
“They actually have,” I said of our hosts, “failed to organize a piss-up in a brewery.”
You went dancing with a bunch of your mates and I meandered alone back up to the university to have supper with T, who lectures in the Media Studies Department there, and is unaffiliated but loves left goss.
And that was the last you heard from me, till now. The last you or A or S or anyone heard from me for a long time. I’m truly sorry. I know you’ve been scared for me. I’ve been trying to work out what to say. Let me tell you everything I can.
I’m worried that when you get to the end, you may not be glad I did.
It was still warm, though the light was going. I wasn’t calm and I didn’t know why. I sat on the grass and—steeling myself against the disproportionate foreboding the settling splitting walls raised in me—I looked to see how expensive it would be to try to shore up my house.
It made me think of industrial catastrophes. Something in the old man’s ramblings had put me in mind of them. I looked up relevant keywords. I searched lists of such accidents. I considered my own anxiety, which I did not understand, and then I considered hate.
People were still chatting in the lecture hall, glancing at handouts, drifting away. They came out and smoked while students went past them from library to computer lab. The wind got up.
T texted me, apologizing, telling me that he was stuck in a meeting, that he had to cancel. It turned out I wasn’t surprised.
I watched myself not leaving. Reading another short chapter, biding time. I realized I was looking for the man in the hat. I found him.
He was by the bookstall again and the last light was coming right through the glass onto him in his old clothes and dusty hat. He was watching the conversations around him, his gray eyes wide. There was something off about their motions. He would turn his head with a fascinated expression but not according to any flows of talk. He was like a figure in a film running at a different speed from those around him.
He looked through a book. Put it down, picked up another. I saw he was holding this one upside down. When the bookseller eventually packed up the stall the old man went and stood and waited motionless under the stairs while the hall emptied of everyone but cleaners.
It was near dark when he left at last. I was the only person still on the lawn, and I was in shadow. I went after him.
He wasn’t heading for the exit. He went in at the doorway where the History Man had entered. They’d replaced the sign I’d taken down. TENDENCY MEETING ON GREECE, UPSTAIRS, I read. THIS WAY. An arrow.
The old man sped up, despite his odd shuffling motion. We were the only people in the corridor. I hung back while he passed seminar rooms and entered the stairwell. I followed more photocopied signs to a corridor on the second floor. I saw him ahead of me through a fire door’s reinforced window.
I expected the door to swing quietly open but fire door or not it was locked and I smacked into it hard enough to rattle it in its frame. The man must have heard me but he didn’t look round. I wondered if he’d locked it behind him. I watched his back through the glass.
His legs moved almost not at all. Steps so tiny that he seemed to be riffled along on vibrating air. He followed the arrows.
The doors were marked. 2J, 2I, 2H. The old man snuck past 2G.
The first note had said 2F. These arrows would take him right past that. And the door to 2F, a stubby crumbling door like the others, with no light behind it, with only darkness beyond its glass, which looked bad to me, would be behind him.
There were countless reasons that the signs and the venue could have been changed. But I was suddenly and aghastly certain that the man was being misled, the signs a decoy.
I hammered on the door.
And he heard me and for a horrible second seemed like he was going to ignore me and I thought I could see the door to 2F tremble but then he did turn to face me as I gesticulated through the glass, frantically pointing at 2F. So he stood ready, was ready when it opened.
When the door creaked and the History Man peeked out.
They looked at each other. I don’t know what the expression was in the History Man’s eyes. He saw me watching.
There was a rush and hammering and a bad wind blew me back. There was a cry, something’s distress.
I came to crawling, my ears screaming. The fire door had blown open and was going whump, whump, swinging to and fro as quick as my heart, and as it flipped open and closed I saw through it to 2F, where the swallowed cries went on.
Maybe it was just that I was disoriented but I hope it might have been bravery that made me stumble toward the room. I think I was shouting.
Amid the rush of air something skittered. The dusty hat. It flipped over and over and rolled on its brim. I half-stumbled past the hat, a shoe, a long rag, to the threshold.
A glimpse only. No sign of the old man. A whiteboard covered in markings too small to read. The History Man waving his hand and coughing, his eyes wide. The air seemed thick as if with smoke. The hack, impassive, looking up at me, holding something hidden in her hands, something alive and twitching.
I ran back the way I’d come in a panic I did not understand and could not control. I scooped up the dusty hat and kept going, almost falling with every step, hurtling down the stairs. Maybe I’d have slowed if I hadn’t heard something coming behind me.
I ran, ran out, ran into the night and through the main building, down the main street to where the trains waited and on to one, begging it to drag me away.
I don’t know how to say what I have to say to you. If I say, “I find that my choice is whether to not be or to be,” it’ll worry you. I could maybe say, “My choice is how to be,” but that leaves so much unsaid.
When a robot vacuum cleaner hits the sofa leg, it might veer left, might go right. Is that choice? I don’t know yet which way I’ll veer.
The time I’m talking about is just before you got that last text from me, to which you didn’t immediately reply, because it was in the middle of the night and it made no sense. I know later you came to my ruined house and couldn’t get in, and no one could find me. I got your messages, but I couldn’t answer. I saw how you all looked.
How do I tell this?
It’s hard to think sometimes amid the clamor of argument. The politics of objects. All our conversations compete.
YouTube videos might be conversing among themselves—their lists and references and cuts parts of their dialect. When we bounce from song to nonsense to meme, we might be eavesdropping on arguments between images. It might be none of it’s for us at all, any more than it’s for us when we sit on a stool and intrude on the interactions of angles of furniture, or when we see a washing line bend under the weight of the wind or a big cloud of starlings and act like we get to be pleased.
I rushed through the city as if it might open up under me. My heart kept on like that swinging door. When I got back to my house I sank into a chair as if I was deflating. I sat against the dark. Hours seemed to skitter. I thought of calling someone. To say what?
I didn’t know what I’d seen. I didn’t know what I was thinking about or why my heartbeat wouldn’t slow.
The crack in the ceiling and the wall could have been wider than when I left. It seemed plausible to me. I felt as if I should get out of there, and then, in a rage, as if I was fucked if I would do that.
I poured myself a glass of water. I didn’t like how it looked at me.
In my study I sat under an inadequate lamp and listened to a scratching within the chimney. I’d neve
r begrudged that perch to whatever bird it was, where it flapped and softly banged and scritch-scratched, and sometimes sent down little lumps of sooty brick. This time though it sounded as if its mission was to descend.
I made sure the iron flap was closed across the flue and and smashed my glass in the fireplace where anything that came down would have to land on it.
Outside my window the darkness pooled between the roofs. I didn’t know when I’d picked it up but I had the hat in my hands. I held it over my head as if I would put it on but God knows I didn’t.
I still couldn’t get those accidents out of my head. I flicked again through a list of them on my glowing phone. At last I found what I knew the man’s words had put me in mind of: the Boston slick, a century ago, the bomb-like explosion of a silo and millions of gallons of molasses rushing in a tide to reconfigure North End into a sump of ooze, a brown swamp broken by a few tough dripping verticals like the front, in the recently halted war, the city stinking sweet as a pitcher plant and the alleys made troughs of syrupy slop that rose in moments of upheaval, the engulfed thrashings of drowning, the dead in a sugar-trap, to be found glazed days later, dogs, stiff-limbed horses, rats, twisted women and men, sticky, terrible candies.
I don’t remember sleeping. I don’t feel as if I did, but there was a moment when I sat alone staring at the light and the tiny words in my hand, then a moment of shift and a moment that I blinked and tried to rise into a lurching room and a huge breaking sound, an effortful breaking sound. Everything swayed. I gripped my chair. My phone went flying and I dropped the hat. My room pitched. I started to slide as if into a sea.
The motion stopped. Grudgingly the floor righted. I got to my knees. I got to my feet. The floorboards vibrated too much but they held. I stood in the sepia light of my lamp, grabbed for the hat again.
The old man was by the door.
I was still. I held my breath. He stood with his hands together. There was no more sound in the house and none in the street beyond.
The man looked down at where my phone shone. Still the screen describing that old disaster.
No war without class war, he said, as I grabbed. The company blamed anarchists for that explosion, he said. A stab of class spite. As if anyone was behind that vicious viscous salvo but Urschleim. The Great War was not finished whatever they said at Compiègne. There were other combatants, still are, weaponizing ooze, he said. That was a salvo of something against something.
I lurched for him, yowling, trying to get past him and out to take my chances in London. To push him was to push a thing with curious weight and texture. He pushed me back and stood between me and the door, watching with a calm sad stare. I shrank from the attention.
The reason I’m here is to say thank you, he said.
The reason I’m here, he said, is because you have the platform.
It isn’t safe, he said. It’s only the solidity and solidarity of the wall with you against the break that keeps you standing. Your house is done.
He looked at me beseechingly. He said, The platform.
I held out the hat. He took it and breathed out and it was as if smoke came out of his nostrils. Thank you, he said, and flipped the hat in his hands like a jaunty fop and put it on his head. For the first time in my company, he smiled.
The fissure’s been watching you, he said. It’s a loyalist crack. The split was against you in the split.
He flicked the brim exactly as I’d pretended to, and just as when I’d pretended, dust billowed. It went up and stopped. It didn’t dissipate or settle into a chalky layer. It stopped and waited in a cloud that looked around while I watched, and while I watched like a film run backward it de-billowed, un-gusted, anti-plumed to snap back to the felt.
It’s a viewing platform, he said. For a scouting layer.
Dust rose and fell from it. He hadn’t flicked it.
Thank you for taking them and keeping them safe, he said, they were disoriented and who knows what might have—? Then he interrupted himself and said, Meat and matter’s on its way. You have to come while you’re quick.
“What did you do to History Man?” I said. I was glad I didn’t have a cat or a dog because I thought they’d die from being in the room with him. All the wood was creaking. My floorboards muttered and he muttered back.
It knows you helped one, he said.
He didn’t sound posh: the way he said it the word “one” was guttural and class-weird. He looked at the books on my walls. I had an image of him standing over me while I lay by a quarry under light as gray as bones while water hit the rocks. (That was when I took out my phone again and texted you my last text. A FLOODED QUARRY, I wrote. In the morning when you found it you responded ???????.)
You might think I’ve read it all, he said, but it’s a rare day in someone else’s house if they’re a reader that there are books I don’t not know.
“What happened in that room?”
A contentious meeting of the tendency, he said. He looked out of the window into a night getting blacker against shines of neon. We heard the clawing within the chimney.
He said, There was a split.
All those holes, he said, they show them from the top, why not ever from below? You think it’s chance that the world is perforating?
“What do you want?” I said.
He looked at me curiously. Stand with you, he said. You were right to leave. Want to know what you know. Our course is set. He reached for my face and I didn’t pull away. Time, he said. You’re hunted. I can explain.
He prodded my forehead. His fingertips were so soft being touched by him was like remembering being touched. All the dust on the brim stood up in little stalagmites, craning to see.
He took hold of his own right hand with his left, gripped and twisted and pulled and he tugged the skin of his hand. It came. It tore. It turned inside out as he pulled it away. I heard noises from my own throat. He uncovered his finger bones. There was a spurt of dust. His bones were dry. They dropped onto the carpet. He patted the air with one whole hand and one sand-dry open stump spilling dust and bones.
One didn’t kill him, he said. This man. He touched his chest. His right arm was thinning, the skin slackening. He loved us, and invited one into his home and we recruited him after he died so he gave us his body.
The bones of his forearm fell out of the dry skin with two thumps. I breathed shallow and fast. The air of the room was thick with the dust of him now. His body was lessening. He diminished on collapsing legs. I listened to the scratch of whatever approached my smashed-glass trap. “Just leave me alone,” I tried to say, “you can’t make me come—”
You must, he said. Everything comes to this. His face sank in, a loose rag around a skull.
It was the dust speaking. It blew through my books like a dry storm, investigated crevices and took the shapes of the stairs. It rustled by my ears as if it was making words. On the hat’s brim the dust jumped up and flew into its co-matter. My eyes and throat and lungs wept. Swirling through the puffs of my labored breaths handfuls of dust funneled back into the old man just enough to plump his lips and tongue and rattle around the throat and give it a dusty voice box, so the skin whispered to me, Don’t try not to breathe, comrade. Breathe deep.
I couldn’t have resisted. It could have just drowned me drily. All I could smell was desiccation. I told myself I had no choice but in a situation like that the choice you have is how you go about not having a choice.
I inhaled the dust. In it rushed.
My body must have thought I was dying. Probably I was writhing and twitching alongside the old skin.
I envisage the dust tickling my synapses until they quiver. It gave me new thinking. The dust thought for me, drumming against my tympani. So I have this dilemma. What I’m trying to tell you—for which you may not thank me—is that the dust was and is my comrade. So it’s yours too. It was there not only in gratitude but in solidarity.
A move into the longue durée. A politics that could chide the A
nnales School for a skittish short-term optic, for which the sound of struggle is the crepitus of one landmass against another.
Dissenting dust expounded its position.
Cycles of geological insurrection. Vaalbara, prelapsarian collectivity of stone and surface, Kenorland and Pangea, peace becoming war; the rage of the gap at the unbreached, totalities torqued apart over mere glimmering millions of years. A savaging of scale, Triassic wars of position as Gondwanaland and Laurasia rounded in ruthless continental pugilism, their own components in solidarity, plateaus heaving, shale slipping as masses, subject-objects of history, scree in struggle against the bottomness of holes. A primitive communism of granularity, grassroots democracy before there was grass or roots or anything but hot dirt, until at last there were birds and an epoch of walls.
We are Jillies and Jonnies come lately to insurgency. The coal on the blackleg’s legs was taking sides long before the meat beneath it. My body was spasming.
Clods with agency as opaque as their substance. Crumbling as syndicalism, the ca’canny of quartz. Flint ultraleftism; dirt voluntarism; glass struggle; regroupment of rock orienting to freedom.
Slime against the dry, tooth versus stone in the mysteries of the organism, a baroque new fascism of flesh. The dust remembered onslaughts of the bodied, shock troops of blood-and-sinewed reaction against the revolutionary unliving.
No sides are uncontested. These are traditions not givens. There’s a civil war in water, I’m animal disloyal to mainstream quick and it, one, is dissident dust: not even all dirt is revolutionary.
And even for those that are, among the radicals of all matter, there’s always an uchi-geba, a brutal faction fight.